Enhanced MLP performance and fault tolerance resulting from synaptic weight noise during training.

We analyze the effects of analog noise on the synaptic arithmetic during multilayer perceptron training, by expanding the cost function to include noise-mediated terms. Predictions are made in the light of these calculations that suggest that fault tolerance, training quality and training trajectory should be improved by such noise-injection. Extensive simulation experiments on two distinct classification problems substantiate the claims. The results appear to be perfectly general for all training schemes where weights are adjusted incrementally, and have wide-ranging implications for all applications, particularly those involving "inaccurate" analog neural VLSI.